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Your worst enemy could very well be inside your network. We'll show you how to prevent insiders from sharing your most critical data.
Your problem might not be a hacker trying to break into your network: It could be Jim in engineering, or Steve in sales--maybe even Cindy in production. Your employees could be snatching intellectual property and e-mailing it to competitors, or they could be inadvertently sending out confidential customer information.
Employees who deliberately or unwittingly leak confidential information outside corporate confines pose a huge threat--one that businesses might overlook. This kind of data seepage can cost an organization millions of dollars and cause irreparable damage to its reputation.
According to a 2005 U.S. Secret Service and Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute study of insider breaches in critical infrastructure sectors, 81 percent of such breaches resulted in financial losses ranging from a $500 to "tens of millions of dollars." Additionally, 28 percent of the respondent organizations said their reputation was hurt by the breach.
The complexity of today's computing environments, with business networks becoming larger and more porous, is exacerbating the insider threat. What used to be the network perimeter is essentially a borderless mesh of connectivity for applications, telecommuters, business partners and customers. Adding to the problem is the untracked decentralization of information storage in files and databases across many systems. Spreadsheets, word processing documents and other files are not only stored on server shares and local user folders, but are strewn across messaging systems, mobile devices and local workstation folders. Maintaining proper access control on this information is nearly impossible.
Now, in this age of rogue and careless insiders with immeasurable access, network managers--and even many business executives--are taking a closer look at their internal systems. Technology suppliers have responded by developing new ways to address the insider threat.
So before your network springs a leak, here are several technologies to consider for keeping your most valuable data secure.
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